Security technology in enterprise-class data processing, such as data processing that is performed through use of mainframe computers, often includes transaction processing computing environments that utilize a plurality of Customer Information Control System (CICS) regions. Each CICS region is typically instantiated for online, real-time transaction processing. It is also common for a task that executes in one CICS region to access data or processes of another region. In such instances, although the user, be it a human or logical user, is authenticated in a first region, the user must also be identified in the other region, either through inheritance of security credentials from the first region or by re-authentication in the second region. Thus, when exchanging transactions between CICS regions, with the ACF2™ CICS interface, security credentials utilized in a first region to authenticate the user may be included in cross-region data communications.
Current ACF2™ technology, in use since the 1980's, causes CICS control blocks sent between CICS regions or address spaces, such as in Terminal Input/Output Areas (TIOAs), to be altered to include ACF2™ security data to identify the user. These data additions on the sending CICS region side and extractions on the receiving CICS region side occur during Event Notification Facility (ENF) CICS-driven events at entry to and exit from the CICS transformer process when CICS transaction routing or function request shipping occurs. On the sending side, the data additions occur after the transformer process and on the receiving side, the data extractions occur before the transformer process. However, such manipulations of the TIOA data structures can interfere with CICS processing resulting loss of ACF2™ data and CICS processing errors. As a result, abnormal ending (abends) can occur due to presence of foreign or corrupt data.